Vol. 90 No. 1

239

The Russian

Torture Chamber

Prince Kropotkin, in a letter to the London

Times July 25, 1908,

10

fif

executions are perpetrated by wholesale, and the executioners are paid teen rubles to fifty rubles (that is, from

Post August 6, refers to a statement signed by thirty-one members of the third Duma, in which it is affirmed that from December, 1905, to June, 1906, a period of six or possibly seven 'months, 1,170 persons in the Lettish region were executed without trial, and a number several times larger were flogged or otherwise tortured:

The punishments began to take, from August, 1906, the character of true inquisition tortures, which were carried on in concealment, not to inflict pain, but to obtain confessions from the arrested persons, and consequently to deliver them to the field

courts. However, it happened very often that such "confessions" could not be obtained, and then the persons arrested were simply shot, or killed with bayonets, without any semblance of trial. In such cases it was ordered to report that the prisoner was killed "while making an attempt to escape;" but even this excuse was not always resorted to; many were killed quite openly.

sands of unhappy, misguided men from among the best class of Russian people are put to death-men misguided by the very people who execute them. "And not this kind of dreadful thing alone is being done, but in the same place and with the same cold-blooded cruelty all sorts of other tortures and violence are being perpetrated in prisons, fortresses, and convict settlements." The demoralizing effect of this wholesale massacre is everywhere seen. "Children play at hangings. Lads from the high schools, who are almost children, go out on expropriating expeditions, ready to kill, just as they used to go out hunting." The responsibility for these high crimes. Count Tolstoy charges on the highest officials of the Government: "Like the executioner, you fear men, and fear the more the greater your responsibility for the crimes: the Public Prosecutor more than the Secretary; the President of the Court more than the Public Prosecutor; the General Governor more than the President; the President of the Court of Ministers more still, and the Czar most of all." The excuse offered for this policy is that "firm measures are necessary to put down the revolutionaries. In fact, these barbarities promote revolution and multiply the revolutionaries.

This statement is abundantly confirmed by an official report of similar conditions made to the second Duma, a copy of which is to be found in the State archives at Washington, the details of which are. quite too dreadful for publication. And these reports cannot be discounted as newspaper exaggerations; they are official documents, and more than confirm all that The Outlook has said on this subject in times past. Scarcely less significant is the terrible indictment of the Russian Government by Count Tolstoy in his recent paper entitled "Government by Execution," reprinted in Littell's Living Age for August 8. He addresses himself directly to the Russian Government, which, so far as we have seen, has made no reply. He says that in the eighties there was only one executioner in all the Russias; now

Your Government men call the acts of the revolutionaries "atrocities" and "great crimes," but they have done nothing and are doing nothing that you have not done, and done to an incomparably greater extent. They only do what you do. You keep spies, deceive, and spread printed lies, and so do they. They are altogether your disciples; they have, as the saying is, picked up disciples, they are your products, your chil all your little dodges; they are not only your dren. If you did not exist, neither would